Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

He gazed up at her with shining eyes. ‘I know this is cheesy but I wanted to do it properly. Eva, you know how I feel about you. Will you marry me?’

Eva stared at him open-mouthed. She knew she needed to formulate a response but her mind seemed to have frozen. The harder she pushed herself to think, the more her mental gears refused to shift, as though an iron rod had been thrust into the cogs of her thinking machinery. She registered an elderly couple and their basset hound standing a short distance away smiling encouragingly at them, having stopped to watch the heart-warming scene unfold. Eva tried her hardest to force the wheels to turn but when they finally creaked into action they accelerated out of control, producing not some sensible response to the question of whether she wanted to marry the man down on one knee in front of her, but instead a series of increasingly fantastical imaginings in which the basset hound suddenly ran over and savaged Julian, or she herself levitated into a nearby tree, or a bomb went off, hurling them down the hill, or a meteorite fell from the sky, obliterating them and everything around them so that only a smoking crater was left.

Her mind was still spooling through this series of unlikely events that would prevent her from having to answer the question when the silence was finally broken by the tinny and unmistakable sound of the Crazy Frog song. The noise offered a momentary relief, an external distraction and an excuse to look away from Julian, still waiting on bended knee, and glance around, until after a few seconds it became apparent that the sound was coming from her own pocket. She realized with an inward groan that she must have left her phone unlocked on her desk yesterday while Big Paul was around and he’d changed her ringtone to the most annoying tune yet produced by the twenty-first century.

‘Don’t answer that!’ Julian yelped as she stood up and reached into her jeans pocket.

‘I’m not, I’m just stopping it ringing.’ She glanced at the number. Sylvie. Eva hit the Reject Call button and stuffed it back in her pocket. Julian remained looking up at her expectantly. The phone resumed ringing again almost immediately. Sylvie again. She silenced it and crammed it back into her pocket.

‘This isn’t exactly going to plan,’ Julian said. ‘But just so you know, this is the bit where you fall into my arms and tell me that you’d love to marry me.’

‘Julian, get up. I’m really sorry, but. . just get up.’

She looked down at her feet as Julian’s face slackened and paled and he clambered upright and brushed the dirt off his legs. The elderly couple hurried off towards the observatory followed by the basset hound, which turned away slowly with a mournful parting look.

‘So that’s a no then,’ said Julian quietly. ‘You don’t want to marry me.’

‘Julian, it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s not a yes or a no. It’s just that I didn’t see this coming. I haven’t had a chance to think it through. I know this is awful but I can’t just say yes on the spot if I’m not totally sure. Changing my mind later would be even worse.’

‘We’ve been together for two years. I’d say that’s plenty of time to think about it. Where did you think our relationship was going? Oh, that’s right, you haven’t thought about it. You think about where your career is going, you have time to think about that, but not about where we’re going.’

The phone started ringing again.

‘Julian, I’m really sorry but I’m going to have to answer this. It’s Sylvie and she wouldn’t keep calling if it wasn’t urgent. She could have gone into labour early and Robert’s in New York this week. I’m going to have to take this, okay?’

But he was already striding away from her down the hill and she had a sudden overpowering sense of déjà vu, remembering a time when five years earlier another man had strode away from her down a hill, and in the same moment realized that it didn’t feel as bad this time, and wondered whether that was because it got easier the more times it happened or whether it was simply because she had wanted Benedict to stay so much more than she wanted Julian to.

She hit the Accept Call button on her phone. ‘Sylvie? What is it? Is the baby coming?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s Lucien. Eva, he’s in prison.’

Eva spotted him as soon as she entered the visiting room, slouched on a plastic chair at a melamine table of the sort she remembered from her school canteen. He was wearing his own clothes, jeans and a hoodie, and looked skinnier than when she’d last seen him at Sylvie’s wedding a few months earlier. At the table to his left, a weaselly-looking hard-nut with full-sleeve tattoos was growling at a lank-haired sobbing woman. To his right, a boy with a crew cut and a shell-shocked expression on his face, who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen, sat with what must have been his mum, trying not to look as petrified as he obviously felt.

It seemed incredible to her that Lucien could be forcibly held in this place. She hated herself for thinking it, knew that Keith would despise her for voicing such a thing, but most of the other men in that room at least looked like they belonged there. But Lucien? Sure, he was a rogue but he’d always been easy to forgive; his penchant for mischief and his unreliability were inextricable from his sheer appetite for life, encompassing whatever passed before him: people, sex, drugs, alcohol, adventure, it almost didn’t matter what, so long as it wasn’t boring. Over the years she’d never quite managed to shake off the slight hunger he provoked in her with his reckless smile, full of mingled awareness and disregard for the spark that crackled between them, which had never burst into flame since that one time, years ago, but had still prevented them from ever quite settling into the comfort of friendship. But Lucien wasn’t laughing now, and he wasn’t a lovable rogue to the police and the courts; he was just another bloke who’d been caught with a lot of class A drugs. He hadn’t seen her as she entered the room and she watched him for a few moments, overwhelmed by a rush of something softer yet fiercer than what she usually felt for him.

He stood up from his seat as Eva approached and for a moment they hovered, unsure how to greet each other in this unfamiliar setting, before settling for a tentative hug. He smelled of stale sweat with a sharp chemical undertone.

‘Are we allowed to do this?’ she mumbled into his ear.

‘What, hug? Yeah. I think so. I’m only on remand so things aren’t all that strict. You get to wear your own clothes, that sort of thing.’

Lucien withdrew awkwardly from Eva’s embrace and they sat down on the plastic chairs on either side of the table and for a moment neither of them knew what to say. He ran his fingers through his greasy hair, and then drummed them on the tabletop.

‘So, have you bent over to pick up the soap yet?’ Eva tried a joke, suddenly desperate for reassurance that he would laugh this off like he did everything else.

Instead he glared at her. ‘That’s not as funny as you think it is. You’ve been watching too much Law and Order.’

They sat in silence for another moment or two until Lucien’s frown softened.

‘Listen, thanks for coming. I didn’t want to ask Sylvie, what with the pregnancy and everything,’

‘I doubt she’d have managed it to be honest. I don’t know if you’ve seen her lately but she’s the size of a house. I’m constantly on alert for a phone call saying the baby’s on the way. I thought that was what she was calling about, actually, when she rang to tell me what had happened with you. It came at a bit of an awkward moment.’